The Right Questions
by Ragua
Summary: Nobody ever asks Tony the right questions.  Spoilers through Season 5.


**The Right Questions**

When you let people down, and they tried to make sense of your behavior afterwards, they never asked the right questions. They always asked questions where the answer was obvious to anyone with a brain. "Anthony, what the Hell were you thinking?" (_I wasn't._) "Do you have any idea how stupid that was, Tony?" (_Yes._) "Christ, DiNozzo, how did you get to be such a fuck-up?" (_I was just born that way._) Even McGee, who knew him pretty well, was guilty of this: "What's it like pretending to be someone else?" instead of, "Do you ever stop pretending?"

Jeanne Benoit was no exception to this tendency to ask the wrong questions, which kind of surprised Tony. She was so smart, so on the ball, he'd somehow expected her to see through the smokescreen to the heart of the matter. But she hadn't. She'd wasted the opportunity, asking, "How can I ever trust you again?"

Tony hadn't responded, because the only honest answer (_You can't._) wouldn't have helped the already painful situation. Neither, for that matter, would the question Tony longed to ask Jeanne: "Why the Hell did you ever trust someone like me in the first place?"

He fell back on this question every time he wanted to assuage his guilt. Tony was a player, a flake, a screw-up; Jeanne knew that from the beginning. All the clues that his presence would be catastrophic to any committed relationship had been right in front of her, no matter how well he might have dissembled. And even when it had ceased to be dissembling, she still should have known. With his track record, there was no way he could ever have done anything but screw it up in the end.

But what if she _had_ asked the right question? "Why did you do this?" Not, "_How_ could you do this?" "How" was different than "Why". "How" was about method. "Why" was about motivation. Or madness, which in some cases amounted to the same thing.

Would he have answered honestly though? The less than honest answer was, "It's my job. It's who I am. It's what I do." However much it sounded like a parody of a melodramatic cop show, it might have worked with Jeanne. She was a doctor; she had her own calling and knew about working for something greater than oneself. Their long night together in the morgue with the sociopathic drug dealer had shown him that. Maybe that was the reason she had never asked him "why"—because she already understood about duty, about doing the right thing even when it wasn't easy.

But Jeanne had never asked the question. And even if she had, his pat answer still wouldn't have been the whole truth, the madness behind his motivation. Would he have given her _that_ answer, if she had asked? If she had persisted in the face of the patently incomplete response?

Jeanne actually _had_ come very close to asking the right question once, well before he had fallen all the way, when he was still able to regard her with something resembling objectivity—an assignment to be completed. It was shortly after they had begun sleeping together. Tony, unused to spending the entire night in someone else's bed, had not counted on having to explain inconvenient nocturnal behaviors.

"Who's Kate?" Jeanne had asked over coffee. His own expression had frozen on his face as he met her amused, mischievous gaze. She obviously believed the name he had spoken in his sleep had been that of a previous lover. She wasn't concerned or jealous, just slightly curious, although not above making a point.

Tony had snorted, schooling his features into an embarrassed grin. "Seems like you already have a pretty good idea." Jeanne had teased him mercilessly, and he had reacted with what he hoped looked like good-natured chagrin. The matter was over by the time they had decided where to go for breakfast.

Now Tony looked back at that morning, wondering what would have happened if he had answered her truthfully. Told her that Kate had been his partner. That they'd been like brother and sister, fighting all the time, yet backing each other without hesitation in the face of adversity. That he'd been standing right behind her when she'd been shot by a sniper. That he had watched the back of her head explode like a water balloon. That he sometimes woke up at night and could still feel the warm spatter of blood and brain matter on his face. That all the scrubbing and soap in the world were not equal to the task of removing the stain.

That the weapon that killed her had been acquired through an arms dealer. Maybe Jeanne's father, maybe someone else. It really didn't matter.

What mattered was that Kate was dead. Regardless of what his head told him, in his heart he knew her death was just another of his screw-ups. Maybe he could have done something, maybe it should have been him to catch the bullet, maybe he missed some important detail. Whatever the case, he was alive and Kate was not, and her blood on his face had marked him. It was now his responsibility, more than ever before, to do whatever was necessary to get one more bad buy, one more arms dealer, one more murderer, on more psycho off the street.

The Jeanne with whom he had shared coffee in a tiny kitchen apartment on that spring morning would not have understood. She would have seen madness, not motivation. And the older, wiser Jeanne, whose dreams of a future with him crumbled on that park bench in Georgetown, hadn't asked the right question.

Nobody ever did.


End file.
